Shooting the Messenger

Shooting the messenger has never changed the message.

Almost always, there’s the afterward, when the shooters are standing over the shot and one of them asks out loud what the rest are pondering too:

“I wonder if they were right?”

They can’t ever truly know. Killing the messenger altered what happened next, changed the individual’s AND the group’s experience. It was changed by the shouting, I mean, shooting down the pointer, not what they were pointing toward. This pattern of response is repeated in our lives on micro scales every single day. Mostly between our ears, where we’re shouting for everyone else to shut up and listen, or shooting down arguments while keeping score as if we were in an arcade game. When we’re not paying attention to all of this internal judging and sentencing, this pattern amplifies and can damage relationships. Damaged relationships result in the sense of losing our connections. It’s a cascade that cycles, intensifying as it does, and can lead us to consider actual violence, killing, and destruction, often to scale.

It’s become a pattern—a habitual response cycle—that we can’t seem to break. We’re stuck. We feel it, sense it, and in that way, know it. In our gut.

AND, We are trying to think our way out of it.

Yet, we forget that we’ve actually thought our way into this.

Consequently, we’re deeply confused. Our “go-to” problem-solving tool is the tool that’s causing the most problems.

And that’s truly perplexing.

And we have been stressing about this . . . individually and collectively.

So, let’s take a breath, shall we? Together. Right now. This right now. Now.

You don’t have to physically see the person who is breathing with you in order to feel/realize that they’re there in the experience right now, in the real, taking that breath with you.

Or do you?

This is not a rhetorical question.

It’s a trust question.

Do you believe that we’re in this together and we’re not in life on our own?

Do you believe that it is possible for distinct entities to contribute differently and equally to the goodness of the whole?

The experience you have as a person will be radically different depending upon what you choose to believe.

Both options are equally possible, within the realm of the possible.

The life we experience, the quality of our relationships, the way we approach our jobs, our hobbies, our passions

. . . every aspect of our humanity depends upon, can be changed by, what we choose to believe in . . .

This is not a new message.

Simply a timely reminder. (If believing in time is part of your thing.)